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Drug dealer loses codes for €53.6m Bitcoin accounts
- _frkl 7y agoGarda officers said they were hopeful advances in technology would one day enable them to access the bitcoin so it could be sold. At which point Bitcoins value would be approximately zero... :-)
- James87211 7y agoIs there anything preventing them from brute-forcing the wallets from now until the end of time? They might get lucky in a millennial or two.
- smachiz 7y agoI'm sure IBM has a Quantum Watson for this.
- ta999999171 7y ago........
- YayamiOmate 7y agoThey'd pay more fpr electricity. That's the point of modern widely usedencryption standards. Not to make it intpossible but completely impractical.
- shawabawa3 7y agothey would be better off (by several orders of magnitude) just buying a bunch of lottery tickets
- RL_Quine 7y agoThe size of the keys is such that you could convert all of the matter in the solar system into a computer, and still not have enough compute performance to reasonably have a chance of recovering the key. People are a lot easier to break.
- aedron 7y agoWell, if the police was asking for the private keys that protected my million-euro stash of drug money... I would have 'lost' them too. In that vein, I wonder if they keep an eye on the wallets, and for how long.
- londons_explore 7y agoIf I were in their position, I would sign up for one of those services that alert you when coins move. I run one [1]. I'd then set the alert to go to coldcases@police.ie saying "new evidence on case number xxxx". That way even if the current staff retire, it'll be followed up on. [1]: https://serverthiefbait.com https://serverthiefbait.com
- RL_Quine 7y agoThe chance that some random service run in the Bitcoin space exists in even a years time is vanishingly small. Yes, even yours.
- BubRoss 7y agoIt is plausible to run a service on a $5 VPS. Pay $120 ahead of time and you have it for two years. I don't know why you think it would be so fragile. It wouldn't be difficult to run locally either.
- antsar 7y agoUntil it gets owned by an unpatched CVE, anyway.
- londons_explore 7y agoPretty hard to own a VPS which has no external ports open, even if the software on it is years out of date. In fact, updating software is probably a bigger security risk than not doing so, because you never know when someone manages to package a malicious bit of code into a common debian package. Also, if it did get owned, I'd just have to spend a few hours rebuilding it - no bitcoin wallets or anything to steal on there.
- Melting_Harps 7y agoSparing himself from the old '$5 Wrench attack,' I see... well, goes to show you that Bitcoin does in fact work after all: it proves to be capable of averting confiscation, even if it means giving up (perceived?) ownership. I'd like to believe people who amassed this much wealth in Bitcoin would have backups of backups etc... but I've heard too many goxxing like stories about people losing millions, and other similar exchange exit scams over the years.
- FreekNortier 7y agoImagine how many lives were destroyed with drugs worth €53.6m.
- austhrow743 7y agoOh no, anything but the devil's lettuce. Wont somebody think of the children!
- hadtodoit 7y agoDon't make light of cannabis, it is a drug and like all drugs has side effects. Even moderate use can seriously retard and arrest brain development in teenagers and it can accelerate the onset of schizophrenia in those who are at risk. It's also been associated with lack of motivation, focus, bipolar disorder, depression, and anxiety among a host of other issues later in life. Fully grown adults should be able to choose to do what they want but people who peddle drugs to children deserve nothing short of the death penalty.
- captn3m0 7y agoThat’s the current value of bitcoins. <100k€ in 2012 when he acquired them.
- adelmar 7y ago>"...bought most of the bitcoin in late 2011 and early 2012 using cash he made growing crops of cannabis." More like a couple of thousands.